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Discussions on the history and historiography of Australia's New England

Tuesday, June 05, 2018

Is technology bringing history to life or distorting it?

Czesława Kwoka (15 August 1928 Wólka Złojecka – 12 March 1943 Auschwitz) was a Polish Catholic child who died in the Auschwitz concentration camp at the age of 14. She was one of approximately 230,000 children and young people aged less than eighteen among the 1,300,000 people who were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau from 1940 to 1945. The colourisation was done by Marina Amaral. You will find her website here, a little about the story of Czesława Kwoka and the process here.

There was an interesting piece by Steve Hendrix, in the Washington Post (May 10 2018),Is technology bringing history to life or distorting it?, examining the impact of new digital technology on the presentation and interpretation of history. Examples cited include the colourisation of photos; the use of digital technology to create the speech that JFK would have given in Dallas had he not been assassinated; and the use of powerful interactive techniques drawn from computer games to explain and allow people to participate in historical periods.

I find this an uncomfortable area. I'm not absolutely sure why. The use of dioramas to present historical scenes in museums, for example, has been around for a long time, as have the use of paintings and models. Skeletal reproductions are another example.The recreation of a speech whether by use of voice technology as in the Kennedy case or through the combination of actors and technology as in the case of martin Luther King's “Fill Up the Jails” speech, delivered at Durham’s White Rock Baptist Church in 1960 is more akin to a dramatic performance. They are linked to history, but are not themselves historical works.

Thinking about it, I guess that I have two problems. The first is where the sheer power of the technology overwhelms the history, effectively substituting the presentation for the evidence. The presentation becomes the history, not an interpretation of the history. The second is where the technology alters the evidence in some way, substituting a new for the original.

I have a particular problem with the growing tendency towards colourisation. I am quite prepared to accept that Marina Amaral undertakes careful research to determine which colours to use. I would accept, too, that colourisation can provide new insights. In this sense, a colourised photo become the equivalent of a research paper based on the original photo. The difficulty is that the colourised version often lack context especially since the technique has become so widely available. The simplest rule is not to use a colourised version as evidence at all unless you do happen to know that the original had colour added at the time.

4 comments:

Quote:”The presentation becomes the history, not an interpretation of the history. The second is where the technology alters the evidence in some way, substituting a new for the original.”Couldn’t agree more Jim, History has always been open to interpretation but the original record has always been there as a hard copy, that hard copy being available to all for all time is in jeopardy. Karl Rove of all people had something to say about the new reality we face.“People like you are still living in what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”Discernible reality is to become the new norm.

Originally put in print by Ron Susskind Jim, a NYT journalist. It is appears:three quarters of the way through this NYT magazine article. I remembered reading it at the time and had enough of the words to do the now normal Google search. The original 2004 article is not that easy to find as Google tends to list things in nearest date order and I see a certain amount of dust and controversy has recently emerged.The senior advisor referred to has subsequently been identified as Karl Rove.

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Thanks for this John. I used it as a base for a short post on Personal Reflections, Karl Rove and the rejection of discernible reality https://belshaw.blogspot.com/2018/06/karl-rove-and-rejection-of-discernible.html

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Blog Objectives - and a warning to readers

This blog aims to consolidate and extend New England historical material originally carried on the main New England Australia site. With time, I hope that it will develop into a living history of New England.

Readers should be warned, however, that the original posts are work in progress. This means that ealier posts may have been overtaken by later research or thought. I have to go through and do some updates and cross-links, but this is a slow process.